A media content provider or distributor may deliver various media contents to subscribers and/or users employing different encryption schemes, different coding schemes, and/or differently configured coder-decoder (codec) suited for different devices (e.g. televisions, notebook computers, and mobile handsets). The media content provider may support a plurality of media encoders and/or decoders (codecs), media players, video frame rates, spatial resolutions, bit-rates, video formats, or combinations thereof. A piece of media content may be converted from a source or original representation to various other representations to suit the different user devices.
Streaming media may refer to a server application transmitting a media content (e.g. encoded and/or compressed video and/or audio) in a streaming or continuous fashion while a client application receives and displays the media content in real time (e.g. before the entire media content is received and stored). The quality of streaming media content may vary with network conditions. For example, the quality of the media content may be high when the network condition is good (e.g. low packet error rate, low loss rate, and/or high available bandwidth for media data delivery), whereas the quality of the media content may be low when the network condition is bad (e.g. high packet error and/or loss rate). Dynamic adaptive streaming media may allow a client to dynamically request different encoded versions (e.g. with different bandwidth requirements) of a media content based on varying network conditions and/or client's resources.